Did a Tantrum Kill Kim Jong Il?

A year after the death of Kim Jong Il, little information has emerged about the circumstances of his reported heart attack other than the official narrative that he died from overwork at 8:30am on Dec. 17 aboard his personal train while heading out on another “field guidance” trip.

Doubts about parts of that account have been raised, including skepticism about whether Mr. Kim was actually on the train given his apparent habit of sleeping in late, and satellite images showing the train still in Pyongyang.

European Pressphoto Agency

Kim Jong Il at the site of the Huichon Power station in an undated photo released by North Korean media in January 2010.

South Korea’s Chosun Ilbo newspaper added a little more color to the story on Thursday with an article suggesting that Mr. Kim’s heart attack was triggered by a tantrum after he was informed about serious problems with a showpiece hydro-power plant.

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As with so many accounts of North Korea, the information comes from an unnamed source, and so should be taken with a fistful of salt. But the story is intriguing because it’s certainly plausible that Mr. Kim would’ve been extremely unhappy about such news given the importance of the project and his well-documented bad temper. Throw a weak heart into the mix and, boom, it may have toppled him.

The Huichon Hydro-Power Station, in the far north of the country, was opened in April this year and was designed to be the main supplier of power to the capital city, Pyongyang. Mr. Kim visited the site multiple times during the construction and reportedly pushed for completion by the 2012 centennial celebrations of the birth of his father, Kim Il Sung.

North Korea’s coat of arms.

The importance of hydro-power in chronically energy-deficient North Korea is clear in the nation’s coat of arms, which features a hydro plant. According to the source for the Chosun Ilbo’s story, problems at the Huichon plant were critical.

“It wasn’t just a crack. The safety of the entire dam was in question,” the source is quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, Mr. Kim’s short temper is well known. Kenji Fujimoto, the Japanese chef who worked for the Kim family for many years, has told of how Mr. Kim would throw things at officials who made mistakes. Kim Il Sung reportedly had to intervene to calm his son down during a heated disagreement with officials from South Korea’s Daewoo group during a meeting in the 1990’s. And you don’t have to look far for stories of officials meeting a sticky end after upsetting the younger Mr. Kim.

Also well documented was Mr. Kim’s ill health. He suffered what’s believed to have been a stroke in 2008, and in the notice about his death North Korean state media said he had been receiving medical treatment for heart problems for some time.

The Chosun Ilbo reports that “stress about the trouble at Huichon was apparently the last straw after Kim learned that steel and textile manufacturing plants, also touted as key projects, had serious defects as well.”

Associated Press

Kim Yong Nam, head of North Korea’s parliament, speaks at a ceremony to open the Huichon Power Station in April.

All of which seems possible given the importance North Korea had placed on industrial projects for the 2012 celebrations, although you have to pity the unlucky official was who was tasked with giving Mr. Kim the bad news.

Following his death and the eventual completion of the power plant, state media continued to link Mr. Kim and the success of the project. Perhaps what no-one will say is that Mr. Kim’s demise provided the impetus to get the problems fixed and everything completed on time.

“The Huichon Power Station is a great monumental structure…in the precious patriotic legacy bequeathed by Kim Jong Il to the country and its people,” Korean Central News Agency wrote in one of its dispatches earlier this year.